While going through my access logs I noticed a link from the CarveWright user forums. A user there had posted a tutorial showing how to use Blender for CarveWright patterns. If you don’t know what CarveWright is, it happens to be a bench-top woodcarving machine that automatically mills images into wood based on a 2D height map…

If you happen to be a CarveWrite owner, or are interested in woodworking, or interested in cool machines that will soon take over the world, here are some links:

The CarveWrite website containing information about the machine is available here:
http://www.carvewright.com.

The link to the tutorial can be found here:
CarveWright Blender Tutorial Thread

I’ve mirrored the tutorial here:
CarveWright Blender Tutorial PDF

Apparently the machine also mills certain foams and plastics. It is most certainly not just a great product for craftsmen, but most definitely a big boy’s toy.

UPDATE:

FYI, if anyone is interested in seeing their modeling work immortalized in a CarveWright carving, there are folks on their forum who could get it done.
http://www.carvewright.com/forum

UPDATE:

The use of the “Nor” mapping option in the Map Input tab is an alternative to working with “Orco” for making height maps from models. Using Nor creates the light and dark zones based on the surface normals’ angles to the camera. The “Refl” (Reflection vector) option might make for some interesting results as well.

Here’s a quick video I rendered showing the effects of “Nor” applied as a bump map, which looks very much like it would carved in wood (excepting the animation): Suzanne Bump AVI

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 6:21 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.